iPhone!

Well, Apple announced a new iPhone today. Oh, I am excited! It looks lovely; slimmer than the old one, better battery life, faster, 3G, GPS, and, most significantly, way cheaper; Jobs alleged that it would be under $199 everywhere that it's being sold! It'll be available on the 11th of June; I'm going to be sorely tempted, I know...

Watching the stock price was quite interesting; Apple's fell throughout the keynote, then surged up when the 3G iPhone itself was announced. If you had some nerves, you could make a fair bit of money on Apple's keynotes; this is always the pattern. Research in Motion's (the Blackberry people), meanwhile, fell sharply, then recovered slightly; they're still a bit down. Not surprising; given that the new iPhone has Exchange integration and so forth, it's easy to see that it could be a threat.

There were two other interesting announcements. The first, I feel, is a terrible mistake on Apple's part. They're relaunching an enhanced .mac service at me.com, with email, calendars, photos, files and so forth syncing to the phone. The big mistake, in my mind, is that they are going to be charging for this; $99 a year. You might think that many people would be willing to pay for the convenience. Which leads me to the other interesting announcement.

One issue a lot of people had with the iPhone SDK was that you can't have apps running in the background; this would, on the face of it, make it very hard to write an app which notifies the user, or does something, when something happens. Noticing this deficiency, Apple are releasing a service which allows third parties to push messages to peoples' phones, notifying them that something has happened. With this, and the Google APIs, it seems to me that one could more or less replicate the me.com functionality with Google's services quite easily, and for free, or at least for far cheaper than Apple are doing it. Everyone already has Google accounts, too. I'd be amazed if me.com is a success.

One other thing; no video-conferencing with forward-facing camera, as was much-claimed beforehand. No loss, say I; I've never been convinced that anyone uses videoconferencing except to impress people in big corporate conference rooms, or to show dodgy Internet people their naughty bits. Exhibitionists will just have to stick to Nokia for now.

All in all, I'm really impressed... and I really want one. (an iPhone, not an exhibitionist). I supppose I could justify it to myself on the basis that I might write apps for it and sell them on the app store...

Oh, also, MacOS 10.6 is coming out in a year or so. It doesn't look terribly interesting so far, though besides the now-mandatory faster Javascript, they'll apparently be doing clever things with GPUs and many-core computers. Making a HPC bid, perhaps? Cray already have the glamour supercomputer market sewn up, I suspect...